IBM and IIT Bombay launches OpenPOWER Research Facility

Mumbai: IBM and IIT Bombay today announced the opening of the first OpenPOWER Research Facility (OPRF) at IIT Bombay. The OPRF will help drive the country's National Knowledge Network initiative to interconnect all institutions of higher learning and research with a high-speed data communication network, facilitating knowledge sharing and collaborative research and innovation.

Born out of the collaborative spirit of the OpenPOWER Foundation - a community co-founded in part by IBM, NVIDIA and Mellanox, supporting open development on the POWER architecture - OPRF has been established to provide India's large research and development community with technical assistance and infrastructure to further indigenous research.

With the opening of OPRF, scientists, students, developers and enterprises who are a part of the National Knowledge Network initiative can tap into the latest and best available OpenPOWER-based infrastructure, including the POWER processor, NVIDIA GPU accelerators and Mellanox networking solutions.

To begin with, PhD scholars, MTech and engineering students will tap into OPRF to develop new age applications and solutions around eGovernance, healthcare, education, agriculture and high-performance computing.

"OPRF at IIT Bombay supports an open technology ecosystem for high-performance computing and its applications. OPRF gives opportunities to students, faculty, and researchers to gain familiarity with OpenPOWER system features, and make contributions to the OpenPOWER foundation in terms of power processor, GPU acceleration, network adapters/switches and application codes. In terms of its objectives and activities, OPRF aligns well with the recently-launched National Supercomputing Mission of Government of India," said Prof. P. S. V. Nataraj, Professor and Principal Investigator, IIT Bombay.

"Open collaboration is driving the next wave of innovation across the entire system stack, allowing clients and organizations to develop customized solutions to capitalize on today's emerging workloads,' said Monica Aggarwal, Vice President, India Systems Development Lab (ISDL), IBM Systems.

"The OPRF will enable Indian companies, universities and government organizations to build technologies indigenously using the high-performance POWER processor, helping to drive the national IT agenda of India," she added.

The OpenPOWER Foundation is a global, open development membership organization formed to facilitate and inspire collaborative innovation on the POWER architecture. OpenPOWER members share expertise, investment and server-class intellectual property to develop solutions that serve the evolving needs of technology customers.

It enables members to customize POWER CPU processors, system platforms, firmware and middleware software for optimization for their business and organizational needs. Member innovations delivered and under development include custom systems for large-scale data centers, workload acceleration through GPU, FPGA or advanced I/O, and platform optimization for software appliances, or advanced hardware technology exploitation.